| colin hood on Tue, 9 Feb 1999 17:56:59 +0100 (CET) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
| <nettime> Impaedia - breaching the academy |
A tale of two books
I was feeling a lot better. This wasn't as bad as I
thought it would be. I guess I must have smiled.
Scotty responded with a laugh: "But then, and that's
the best part of all, you showed no mercy when we
were wrong. And you were right. We were wrong.
Hell, I was wrong. And you made that fact very very
clear. Even I could see it."
I must have looked awfully confused. Maybe even a
bit nervous. About the only thing I knew about Scotty
the person, not R. S. MacNeish the bibliographic
entry, was that he had put himself through Harvard
many many years ago by means of a boxing scholarship.
This fact, right or not, was widely known - even by
PhD students.(1)
David Rindos
Once again I return to my reading of novels in the
campus genre. I begin with Plato's depiction of the
pedagogical styles of Socrates: perambulatory ironist
(The Phaedrus), table talking prick-tease (The
Symposium ), boring advocate of credentialised, on site
apprenticeship (The Republic).
I jump a couple of millenia - into the 1960's with John
Barth's epic (campus cyber pastoral bildungsroman),
Giles Goat Boy. I was thirty years old when I first
picked up this great lump of a book; thirty years old
when I finally decided to supplement my meagre art
education with a philosophy training etched in Sydney
sandstone; thirty years old when I bought my first
computer (word processor).
It was only then that I found myself able to write in a
manner befitting a mature authorial ego ideal; only then
that I could imagine a place for myself - in the academy
as different (distinct in function and form) from the
art-world. And even then, I never could quite measure
the gap - passing from (a qualitatively different) one to
the other.
The novel, Giles Goat Boy (The Revised New Syllabus)
lays claim ( expressed from the body of the story) to
being an unauthored memoir (We are never quite sure
how it arrives to pre-publication in the first place). It
opens with a series of letters from the four editors of
the manuscript, each expressing different views as to
the formal and aesthetic qualities, and the commercial
viability of the book.
From the author line-up, the reader may pick between,
Giles (,) Stoker, the son of George Giles, the university
computer, or simply pass over into compliance with the
text's self management in mythopoesis. We arrive at a
"literal truth" possessed of no authorial mission save the
editorial clipping of its lexias and reels (a reference to
the faithful transcription by the "mighty" WESCAC
computer, but also, perhaps, to the cinemascopic cast
of authors who populate the manuscript.
Five moments in story managment fall about between
endpapers: 1/ editorial disclaimers 2/a cover letter to
editors and publishers by the "regenerate seeker after
answers, J.B." (presumably Barth 'himself') 3/ the
(alleged) computer transcript tapes 4/ principle
character's 'post-tape' 5/ J.B.'s postscript to the
posttape. It ends up figured like the true text of the
Torah, written in black figures on white fire, too old to
be believed, archaic - evanescent:
Supposing even that the scroll were
replaced by these endless tapes, one day
to feed Him who will come after me, as I
fed once on that old sheepskin - what
then? Cycles on cycles, every unwinding:
like my watch; like the reels of this
machine. (Giles Goat Boy) (2)
For a moment, twelve years ago, I leapt in (between
tentative tappings of fuzzy green text on to the screen
of my new Amstrad) judging the work a shaggy dog
campus story in the spirit of Laurence Sterne. Today
(and only for a moment or two - as I shred and
recompose this text through successive HTML editings) I
will ackowledge (but never quite come to grips with)
certain libidinal configurations around the scenes of
teaching and learning.
As I transpose characters and story-tellers from 'real
life' campus yarns rendered (irrudicibly dialogic), new
tensions open up around the use and exchange of
knowledge. And as I unwind the reels of "analytic
pedagogy" - melodramas of pedagocal eros, sundry
modernist mini-dramas of exclusion (something like
Beckett's Act without words), the victims change into
aggressors, into commentators, again into perpetrators.
No time to put a stop to it at all. Who would want to?
***
In an Australian newsapaper feature aptly titled "The
Vanishing", (3) Journalist Kate Legge sketched a brief
history of the David Rindos Affair. The American
Archaeologist was head-hunted for UWA while on tour
to ANU in 1988 by head of department, Sandra Bowdler.
Following a stint of acting up as department head, it
became apparent to Rindos that he held quite different
views on the finer points of managerial and fiduciary
responsibility.
Bowdler's petulant, emotional style of supervision and
staff selection was making it tough for a number of
graduate students in her department. Rindos acted to
relocate those students to a less stressful supervisory
environment; too late to curtail an escalating conflict
which was beginning to go public every which way.
Too hard and too late to roll out the heavy sleepers.
The shonky status quo in Archaeology was considered
by many UWA executives as just another institutional
idiosyncracy. Bowdler's network influence within the
university executive (including the VC) led to the
miscarriage, and ultimately the termination of Rindo's
tenure track in 1993. Unemployed and in bad health,
Rindos continued to fight his case for re-instatement
while local media sprayed "Uni Lesbian Mafia Consipiracy!"
headline graffiti over print, radio and TV.
Rindos didn't merry along with the organ grind of the
tabloids. He did however network the facts of the case
to maximum effect, expressing a far more sombre
opinion of the institution that took offense to its own:
I have been denied tenure by the
University of Western Australia. At times, I
want to shout it from the highest towers.
Some days, it has seemed the greatest
accolade of my professional career. I have
been denied tenure because, or so at
least I sometimes believe, I tried to
support all that is good, and just, and
proper in university life. In doing so, I
have done right. I have supported The
Academy. Therefore, academia must still
be alive and well. Yet, what is academia?
(4)
Rindos died of a massive heart attack in December 1997.
It is perhaps too soon to lend a sympathetic to this
keeper of the faith. A book has not (to my knowledge)
been composed or proposed, no fledgling film script
sweating for a treatment of this most harrowing (and
perverse) harassment narrative. Yet right now, the
facts, fictions and characters of this tragic story
collect, transform and interact through the efforts of
Hugh Jarvis at the University of Boston. (5)
A book is writing itself. Many readers compose and
shape this thing. It agitates, squirms, shudders about
the place in a mess of assorted styles, reflections and
personalities.
It arises from the connective synthesis of
eye-to-screen, from the institutions of
author/reader/text, from the behavioural
grammar which emerges across the
point'n'click interface ... It is an
assemblage arising from the interrelations
of a field of forces. It is inherently
unstable and in a process of perpetual
change. (6)
As the codex breaks down and recomposes itself in
cyberspace, so the mediated scene of teaching - to
borrow Eric Raymond's phrasing - is beginning to shape
up to a broadcast" [rather than physical] distribution of
educational goods."(7) In the rush hours of millenial
hope, there's conflicting opinion as to how traditions of
scholarship, deference(s) to the canon, and in situ
meritocracy will prevail (or mutate) in a diverse and
increasingly technocratic educational economy.
Whatever it may be - the new academy does not
passively unfold in the shrinking space of centres of
excellence; does not joyfully explode in the 'otherwise
expressed' of an illocutionary mailing list, a mere
supplement to credentialised speech. A critical
pedagogy might possess, echoing the words of Bill
Readings, a "specific chronotope that is radically alien
to accountable time upon which the excellence of
capitalist-bureaucratic management depend."19 Content
in its wasted time and usable (disposed rather than
merely desired technologies), this learning body, this
confidence to work and think, will fashion no definitive
personality along the fresh, beaten, and hitherto
unused paths from ignorance to knowledge.
One morning you may wake up stupid again. Well who
and what will do something about that?
***
1. David Rindos, "A Far Worse Fate." Found off the main
menu at
http://wings.buffalo.edu/academic/department/anthropology/Rindos/#top
[last accessed February 6, 1999].
2. John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy or, The Revised New
Syllabus. London: Secker & Warburg. 1967. p 699.
3. The Australian,October 19/20, 1995.
4. Hugh Jarvis, (once) a doctoral candidate at the
University of Buffalo, is the principal site manager of the
Rindos Affair 'book'. Begin at
http://wings.buffalo.edu/academic/department/anthropology/Rindos/#top
[last accessed February 6, 1999}
5.Belinda Barnet, "Reconfiguring Hypertext as a
Machine: Capitalism, Periodic Tables and a Mad
Optometrist." Frame (No. 2) , 1998.
http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/frame2/barnet.htm [last
accessed 18/11/98]
6. Eric Raymond, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar."
http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
[accessed December 20, 1998]
7. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins, Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1996. p 151.
***
colin hood (www.angelfire.com/id/makesense/hoodindex)
---
# distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
# URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl